The Swindle of the 'Great Global Warming Swindle'

(crossposted at Green Mountain Daily)

It's got to be hard to be a conservative, especially nowadays. It seems like the only way they can get out of bed in the morning is to exist in some alternate reality... you know, the one where 'they attack us because they hate our freedoms', 'the Founding Fathers wanted this to be a Christian nation', 'intelligent design is real science', 'supporting the troops means keeping them in Iraq', 'George W. Bush is a fine Christian man of integrity', 'if we would just let the markets decide, everything would be fine', and the latest doozie, courtesy of Charity at 'She's Right', 'global warming is not caused by humans'.

Apparently, there was a documentary on the BBC's Channel recently, called 'The Great Global Warming Swindle', which basically says that the overwhelming scientific evidence supporting man-made global warming is a lie. Turns out, it's yet another right wing propaganda hit-piece that plays loose with the facts. Like most classic propaganda targeting right-wingers, it even plays to their sense of perpetual victimhood, driving home the point that 'you are being told lies.'

The documentary was directed by self-proclaimed 'living Marxist' (whatever the hell that is) Martin Durkin, who also directed a BBC series in 1997 called 'Against Nature', which dismisses environmentalists as anti-progress, and believe that sustainable development practices are a 'conspiracy against people'. So his ideology should be quite apparent.

The UK Independent did an investigation of the 'The Great Global Warming Swindle', and found that it:

"was based on graphs that were distorted, mislabelled or just plain wrong. The graphs were nevertheless used to attack the credibility and honesty of climate scientists.

A graph central to the programme's thesis, purporting to show variations in global temperatures over the past century, claimed to show that global warming was not linked with industrial emissions of carbon dioxide. Yet the graph was not what it seemed.

Other graphs used out-of-date information or data that was shown some years ago to be wrong. Yet the programme makers claimed the graphs demonstrated that orthodox climate science was a conspiratorial "lie" foisted on the public."

But, that's just the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. One of the central figures in the program was MIT oceanographer Carl Wunsch, has come out strongly about how his views were edited and presented so as to give a misleading account of his actual views. He discusses it in a piece here, 'I Should Have Never Trusted Channel 4' and also in a letter to the producer:

Fundamentally, I am the one who was swindled---please read the email below that was sent to me (and re-sent by you). Based upon this email and subsequent telephone conversations, and discussions with the Director, Martin Durkin, I thought I was being asked to appear in a film that would discuss in a balanced way the complicated elements of understanding of climate change---in the best traditions of British television. Is there any indication in the email evident to an outsider that the product would be so tendentious, so unbalanced?

I spent hours in the interview describing many of the problems of understanding the ocean in climate change, and the ways in which some of the more dramatic elements get exaggerated in the media relative to more realistic, potentially truly catastrophic issues, such as the implications of the oncoming sea level rise. As I made clear, both in the preliminary discussions, and in the interview itself, I believe that global warming is a very serious threat that needs equally serious discussion and no one seeing this film could possibly deduce that.

An example where my own discussion was grossly distorted by context: I am shown explaining that a warming ocean could expel more carbon dioxide than it absorbs -- thus exacerbating the greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere and hence worrisome. It was used in the film, through its context, to imply that CO2 is all natural, coming from the ocean, and that therefore the human element is irrelevant. This use of my remarks, which are literally what I said, comes close to fraud.

My appearance in the "Global Warming Swindle" is deeply embarrasing, and my professional reputation has been damaged. I was duped---an uncomfortable position in which to be.

Aside from the misrepresentation of Wunsch and the almost constant use of bad data, there's a host of other faulty data in the show. Medialens has an exhaustive analysis of the mind-numbingly false and misrepresented data in the film, too much to list here, but a few nuggets just to give you an idea:

The film repeatedly gave the impression that mainstream science argues that CO2 is the sole driver of rising temperatures in the Earth's climate system. But this is not the case. Climate scientists are well aware that solar activity plays a role, though a minor one at present, as do long-term periodic changes in the Earth's orbit, known as Milankovitch cycles. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Milankovitch_cycles)

The point is that there is a vast body of evidence that very strongly supports the hypothesis that greenhouse gas emissions, of which CO2 is the most important, are primarily responsible for recent global warming. The 4th and most recent scientific assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes:

"Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely [.i.e. probability greater than 90%] due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." ('Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis,' Summary for Policymakers, IPCC, February 2007, page 10; www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf)

We then come to one of the film's most misleading arguments. Antarctic ice cores show that rises in levels of CO2 have lagged 800 years behind temperature rises at specific times in the geological past. This, argued Durkin, +proves+ that CO2 cannot be responsible for global warming - instead global warming is responsible for increasing levels of CO2. But this was a huge howler.

What Durkin's film failed to explain was that the 800-year lag happened at the end of ice ages which occur about every 100,000 years. (See: www.realclimate.org/index.php/ archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores)

I can't help but wonder if some American conservatives are so against the global warming thing just simply due to the fact that Al Gore has played such an important role in increasing its awareness. If right-wingnut Sam Brownback was extolling its dangers, I can't help but to think they wouldn't be so skeptical. I'm surprised John McLaughry hasn't referred to this film, considering his fetish-like obsession with discredited facts and such. But when reality has such a tendency to contradict much of one's worldview, sometimes the only way to deal with it is to make up an alternate one.

It's going to take a lot more than one shabby piece of factually-challenged propaganda to turn the tide of an overwhelming consensus of the world's scientists (with the exception of those on the payroll of Big Oil, of course), and there's also that major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I guess what you believe depends on whether your biases or your capacity for critical thinking skills are the stronger cognitive impulses in your worldview. And, no, just to cut some of you off, I'm not saying we shouldn't debate these things. And I'm not saying people don't have a right to their opinions, or even the right to spread misleading propaganda. But it would be much more helpful if the global-warming deniers would actually do their homework before coming to the table.

"Facts are stupid things." - Ronald Reagan, 1988 Republican National Convention